A blog about science fiction and fantasy novels, films and related matters

Thursday, 18 January 2018

Science Fiction: A Literary History, edited by Roger Luckhurst

The British Library has recently been republishing almost
forgotten novels from its comprehensive archive (a copy of every book published
in the UK is deposited with them). Their Classic Crime series of paperbacks has
proved a great success with more than fifty novels republished, mainly from the
1930s. Everyone knows of Agatha Christie, but there were many other authors
publishing detective stories in what might be regarded as the "golden
age" of the murder mystery novel.

The good news for SF fans is that the British Library is
following up the crime novels by launching a Science Fiction Classics series in
2018. Their press release states that Lost Mars and Moonrise will
be published in April 2018. These are collections of republished short stories
from the golden age of SF. Later titles in the series will include further anthologies
and republished out-of-print novels, showcasing the best of forgotten SF
alongside stories by H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard, John Wyndham and other
well-known writers of the genre.

In advance of this, the Library has recently published a
non-fiction book, Science Fiction: A
Literary History, and has provided me with a copy to review. Edited and
introduced by Roger Luckhurst, this consists of eight chapters by different
authors, each taking a different period of SF (although there are some
overlaps, as the subject does not lend itself to neat chronological divisions).
All of the authors are academics specialising in this field, so they bring a
great depth as well as breadth of knowledge to the subject, covering
international as well as English-language fiction and setting developments in
the context of their times. Each chapter includes some monochrome depictions of
contemporary illustrations, mostly book covers, and concludes with a long list
of references and a short list of recommended reading, including novels and
anthologies. Despite this thoroughness, at around 25-30 pages each chapter is
digestible enough to absorb in one sitting. The chapters are:

1. The Beginnings:
Early Forms of Science Fiction, by Arthur B. Evans.

The first chapter focuses on early science fiction, long before
that name had become established with the advent of the US "pulp
magazines" in the 1930s. Many fans tend to think of Jules Verne, followed
by H G Wells, as being the most important pioneers, so it is interesting to
read of the vast quantities of speculative fiction written before their time. This
is emphasised by the 36-volume anthology of such fiction collated and commented
on by French publisher Garnier in 1787. This was divided into four groups: Imaginary Voyages, Dreams, Visions, and Cabalistic Novels (dealing with the
occult), and commenced with Lucian of Samosata's True History from two millennia ago.

From the 17th century onwards it was noticeable
that rapid developments in scientific knowledge were picked up by writers of
fiction (as they have been ever since). Many of the stories were not just
entertainment, but were intended to teach scientific or socio-political
lessons. The acceptance of the heliocentric solar system sparked a number of
novels about interplanetary voyages, while there was a separate sub-section of "hollow
earth" stories about adventures underground – Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth was
really a late revival of this. Time travel also featured, with the first story
mentioned being Madden's Memoirs of the
Twentieth Century, published in 1733.

A subject of particular interest to me is Future Wars, which
have featured in speculative fiction for a long time; I was pleased to see I.
F. Clarke listed in the references, and I can recommend his Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars
1763-3749 as an outstanding work of international scholarship.

In the latter part of the 19th century a
combination of a great increase in literacy due to compulsory education, plus cheaper
printing methods, and a thirst for entertainment, led to a rapid growth in the
market for fiction. Initially this was mainly met by short stories or serials
in magazines, but by the end of the century the one-volume novel had become
popular. There were early signs of the culture wars resulting from the
divergence between popular fiction and "the solid tradition of domestic
realism" – a divergence which continues to this day with the sometimes
sniffy disregard of genre fiction such as SF by the "literary"
mainstream, despite the fact that some famous mainstream authors have written
novels with an SF theme.

The increasing pace of developments in science and
technology gave a further impetus to SF, with the public increasingly curious
about what the future might bring and the authors stretching their imaginations
as far as they could go. In the case of Wells's The Time Machine, that meant to the end of the world in the far
future. Not all of speculative fiction was scientific, however; the
"gothic horror" stories were still emerging, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
among the best known of them, with others being more concerned with the
supernatural. Marie Corelli was highly successful around the turn of the
century through writing stories which blended "romance, gothic, historical
and society" themes (I had never heard of her, and was surprised to
discover that several of her novels are in print). Another sub-genre is
identified as the "colonial romance", typified by H Rider Haggard,
whose most famous work was King Solomon's
Mines. Invasion stories remained popular into the 20th century,
with William Le Queux among the most prominent authors; sadly, no mention here
of Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the
Sands, my favourite novel in any genre, although I have to admit it would
be a stretch to include it in SF.

3. Utopian Prospects,
1900-1949, by Caroline Edwards.

Utopias have always been a feature of SF, usually consisting
of a contemporary visitor travelling through space and/or time to a different
world where everything is better than it is now. The name was first coined by Sir
Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia,
describing a fictional island society off the coast of South America, but the
concept is earlier still, going back to Plato's Republic. The purpose of most such stories was to point out the
defects of contemporary society compared with the author's preferred solution,
whether it be communism, fascism, feminism, arcadian (a reversion to pre-industrial),
or anything else.

At the beginning of the 20th century H. G. Wells
in A Modern Utopia (1905) was
critical of the idealistic form of utopia, observing that for most of them to
work would require a degree of compulsion only possible in a totalitarian
state. In fact, utopian novels became more ambivalent, showing (as in Wells's Men Like Gods, 1922) that beneath the
surface perfection there was much that was wrong. Eugenics became popular in
both fiction and society – controlled breeding to weed out undesirable physical
and personality traits, or (in the case of Huxley's Brave New World) breeding people to suit specific roles in society,
with the most intelligent becoming rulers and those intended for manual work
being bred for dumb strength. One such novel was Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915), which used eugenics to
develop a perfect female-only society; a very early text which has inspired
feminist SF authors to this day.

In the 20th century, utopian novels were joined
by dystopian ones, often written to warn about where technological and social developments
could take us. An early example was E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909), in which extreme pollution has forced
humanity to live underground, totally dependent on the Machine – which provides
food and other necessities of life. Also significant at this time was Jack
London's The Iron Heel (1908),
forecasting the rise of a brutal capitalist oligarchy. Better known than either
is Karel Čapek's 1920 play, Rossum's
Universal Robots(R.U.R.), which
introduced the term "robot" and foreshadowed future warfare between mankind
and robots: yes, that's the basic Terminator
film series plot, and the inspiration for Isaac Asimov's robot stories of 1939
to 1977.

One culture which surely provided lots of inspiration for
dystopian writers was the USSR, although the most famous of these stories was
also inspired by introduction of mass production: Yegevny Zamyatin's We (1920). This forecasts "a
nightmare of unthinking, scientifically-managed production" so was banned
by the leaders of the new revolution who were notoriously sensitive to anything
which looked as if it might be critical of their actions. He was not the first
Russian author to write in such terms: Valery Bryusov's The Republic of the Southern Cross (1907) is set in an apparent
utopia which contains the seeds of its own destruction. Even under Stalin,
utopias and dystopias were portrayed but, for obvious reasons, generally in
terms which were favourable to communism; Alexei Tolstoy being a noted author
(that's Aleksei Nikolayevich Tolstoy, not the 19th century author Aleksei
Konstantinovich Tolstoy, nor the author of War
and Peace who was Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy).

Perhaps the best-known of all dystopian novels is George
Orwell's 1984 (1949) which I reviewed
on this blog in September 2009, so I'll say no more about it here.

4. Pulp SF and its
Others, 1918-39, by Mark Bould.

Up to now much of the attention has been focused on British
and European "scientific romances", and H.G. Wells is given a final
mention here for the fourth chapter in succession – a tribute to the remarkable
contribution he made to SF – but developments in the USA were taking a
different direction. The first indicator of this is generally held to be the
appearance of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing
Stories in April 1926, in which he announced his intention of publishing
"scientifiction". Other magazines followed, notably Wonder Stories and Astounding. However, since 1860 there had been a lot of popular SF
published in the USA along with more general fiction in the form of "dime
novels". Collectively, this output is now commonly known as "pulp
fiction": a term which emerged in the 1950s meaning "fiction dealing
with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper
manufactured from wood pulp".

In the interwar period, much British SF had a doom-laden
flavour, no doubt influenced by the appalling disasters of World War 1 and the
devastating Spanish 'flu which followed it. The end of human civilisation was a
common theme, e.g. Cicely Hamilton's Thomas
Savage (1922), John Gloag's To-Morrow's
Yesterday (1932), and The World's End
by William Lamb (Storm Jameson, 1937).

Some SF books of this time are
strongly racist in theme, countered by others which are anti-colonialist or
satirical about racism, particularly Black
No More by African-American writer George S. Schuyler (1932). Alternative
histories begin to make a mark, especially by L. Sprague de Camp. Feminist
themes appear in SF, notably by Leslie F. Stone, and political issues commonly
featured, usually favouring socialism. American novelists paid relatively
little attention to the growth of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, a notable
exception being Sinclair Lewis's It Can't
Happen Here (1935) about a populist president who bypasses Congress,
criminalises dissent and subverts the constitution to introduce a form of
corporatist totalitarianism.

Planetary romances were popular in
the USA, especially by Edgar Rice Burroughs, as were "weird fiction"
tales by such as H. P. Lovecraft, and space opera by Edmond Hamilton and E. E.
'Doc' Smith. John W. Campbell wrote Who
Goes There? (1938) about an alien invasion, but he was not just an author;
his main claim to fame was his work as editor of Astounding, in which he favoured SF with a greater focus on
scientific plausibility and consistent world-building.

5. After the War,
1945-65, by Malisa Kurtz.

The author identifies five major developments in SF which
occurred in this period, which was dominated by American output. The first was
the publishing boom and bust, the number of SF magazines reaching a peak of 37
in 1953 before falling to single figures a decade later. Paperback publishing
was also at an all time high with some managing the breakthrough to become
fiction best-sellers: in the UK, John Wyndham's dystopian The Day of the Triffids (1951 - reviewed on this blog in June
2012), and in the USA, Heinlein's Stranger
in a Strange Land (1961) and Frank Herbert's Dune (1965 - reviewed April 2009). Other authors who achieved
prominence in this time were Ray Bradbury, Frederick Pohl, Kurt Vonnegut and
Philip K. Dick (who has since become uniquely successful in having much of his
work translated to film or TV). This period also saw specialist SF book
publishers thriving, most notably the "Ace Doubles" providing two
novels in each book.

The second development was the identification of "hard
SF" as a specific category, focusing on scientific rationalism. Arthur C.
Clarke, James Blish, Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, and much of the output of
Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, fall into this category. This was accompanied
by the parallel development of "social SF", which was more concerned
with "philosophical speculation, ethics and exploring the human
condition". Galaxy magazine was
one of the main publishers of this kind of story, with authors including Bradbury, Harlan Ellison,
and Pohl and Kornbluth, who collaborated to write The Space Merchants (1953 – reviewed here in November 2008), a
satire on corporatism.

Disaster novels, particularly those associated with the
consequences of an all-out thermonuclear war (which many living in that time
regarded as a matter of "when", not "if"), were also
popular in this period; Wyndham has already been mentioned, and J. G. Ballard
was another British author who achieved success in this area. Walter M.
Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz
(1960) is one of the most highly regarded American novels in this field. I have
to say that although I read a lot of these post-apocalyptic books at the time,
I find them mostly too depressing nowadays!

The final development described is women's SF as a critique.
Female authors have long used SF as a vehicle for addressing socio-political
issues in general and the roles of women in particular. Judith Merrill, Kate
Wilhelm, Naomi Mitchison, Leigh Brackett, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin are
all notable in the SF field, with several others achieving success in the
fantasy sub-genre.

6. The New Wave
'Revolution', 1960-76, by Rob Latham.

This is the chapter which interested me the most, as it
covers the period when I started reading SFF and absorbed it in huge quantities
– although as well as trying to keep up with the most noteworthy new
publications I was also catching up with a lot of fiction from the 1950s and
1940s during this time.

It is often said that there are not many basic plots in
fiction, perhaps more of a problem to SF as that thrives on novelty. By the
1960s, a lot of SF was perceived as being derivative, and this stimulated
attempts to introduce radically different kinds of fiction – a movement which
became dubbed the "New Wave", and is described as being "boldly
experimental and militantly political". However, Latham argues that the
break was not as distinct as this, with much of the groundwork for this
fracturing of SF occurring as a result of previous changes, notably the loss of
the dominance of the US market by a few magazine editors as authors enjoyed the
greater freedom of publishing novels.

Nonetheless, this led to the formation of two opposed camps:
the traditionalists vs the "avant-guardists" who were keen on
breaking down the barriers between genre and mainstream literature. Leading the
way was British author Michael Moorcock, already known for his Elric fantasies, who used his editorship
of the New Worlds magazine to promote
"a cross-fertililization of popular SF, science and the work of the
literary and artistic avant-garde".J. G. Ballard was the first author to feature, with William S.
Burroughs, Brian W. Aldiss, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline, Norman Spinrad and
Thomas M. Disch. I read all of these at the time, except for Zoline who I never
encountered. Sales of New Worlds
suffered as many of its readers preferred traditional SF, and in the USA the
surviving magazines remained largely traditional; it was in novels that the
avant-guard fiction flourished. Despite this, some great stories first emerged
in serialised form (e.g. Frank Herbert's Dune
and Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality
series) while established writers Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison shifted
gear to write New Wave fiction. The author observes that the US form of New
Wave focused more on breaking taboos concerning sex and religion, from writers
such as Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon.

By this time open warfare was taking place between the New
Wavers and the traditionalists, largely in the form of a "generation
gap". I was only vaguely aware of this at the time as I happily ploughed
through whatever I could get my hands on, but I must admit I found the
avant-garde authors much harder work to read, and the traditional SF a lot more
fun and less depressing. Not all writers took sides – Ursula Le Guin remained
an independent voice, and there was a remarkable resurgence of "Hard
SF" from Larry Niven, Gregory Benford and John Varley (three of my
favourite authors at the time). Indeed I would argue that Larry Niven's Known Space series could also be
regarded as utopian in that it is set in a future in which humanity has spread
through a huge volume of space, interacting with other races and cultures, with
individuals becoming almost immortal; this now seems a very fanciful dream.
Much the same could be said of Iain M. Banks's later Culture series.

The trend of writing apparently never-ending book series
(very popular with publishers, as if the first book caught on the sequels sold
themselves) also emerged, such as Frank Herbert's Dune,Asimov's later Foundation and Robot books, and Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels (Dragonflight
was another favourite of mine). C. J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold have
followed this trend with fiction that is relatively traditional except that the
old taboos on sexual issues have gone, with gay and lesbian characters
routinely featuring. Eventually, the initially sharp boundary between
traditional and avant-garde became softened, with fiction now spread across a
continuum between the two extremes and frequently including elements of both.

7. From the New Wave
into the Twenty-First Century, by Sherryl Vint.

The last quarter of the 20th century saw SF as a
diverse field, with an increased focus on social and political issues including
environmentalism, feminism, gender issues and anti-racism. A good example of environmental
issues is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars
trilogy; of feminism, much of Sheri S. Tepper's work; of gender issues, Samuel
R. Delaney; and of racism, Octavia E. Butler.

During this time the personal computer and the internet
brought a revolution to society which was also reflected in SF with the growth
of "cyberpunk", most notably William Gibson's Neuromancer. A kind of reaction to this came in the form of
"steampunk", alternative worlds featuring Victorian steam-powered
technology developed to a far greater extent, e.g. Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine. An interesting
development was the adoption of SF plots by established mainstream authors such
as Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos
sequence) and Margaret Atwood (Oryx &
Crake trilogy; The Handmaid's Tale).
Knowledge of SF from many other countries than the UK and USA increased as
translations became more readily available.

There were attempts to establish new sub-genres. One was
"Mundane SF", promoted by Geoff Ryman, which focuses on urgent real-world
problems in the near future, and restricts itself to incorporating only known
or feasible science – the "hardest" of Hard SF. So, conventional
rockets exploring the solar system are OK, but interstellar faster-than-light
ships, alien races and super-powers are not. As science has developed, so has the scope of
such stories, with the most recent developments in genetics opening up a range
of possibilities for the future of humanity (see Nancy Kress's Sleepless series). Another new sub-genre
was "The New Weird", coined by M. John Harrison; a fusion of SF,
horror and surrealism.

By the end of the 20th century, SF had become an
international means of exploring the consequences of the entire range of
social, political and technological issues facing humanity; something which no
other form of literature could claim.

8. New Paradigms, After
2001, by Gerry Canavan.

The final chapter starts with a rather sardonic summary of
the failure to occur of the many futures forecast by SF authors for the year
2001 – starting, of course, with the film 2001
itself. However, the author notes that world events appear to be becoming more
erratic, less predictable. He observes that Charles Stross recently had to
rewrite a near-future SF story after the UK unexpectedly voted to leave the EU;
sometimes, the timing of events can be unkind to authors.

As the various consequences of global warming gradually
develop, these become the accepted background for any SF set on Earth in the
foreseeable future. So does the shortage of certain key resources – mostly importantly,
fresh water. I should perhaps note that this is not new; sometime in the 1970s I
read a novel concerning a future in which the competition to secure water
supplies had become the major factor in conflicts (sadly, my memory is unable
to produce the title or author, but the publisher was probably Gollancz – I
used to home-in on their distinctive, yellow-jacketed books in the library). As
a result of these developments, any realistic SF set in the near-to-middling
future tends towards pessimism if not full-blown dystopianism, with the
ecological crisis overhanging everything.

The main competitor to environmental issues in recent SF has
been the Singularity, defined here as "a period of exponential social and
technological transformation that will be fuelled by the advent of
self-augmenting artificial intelligence". This concept has now hit
mainstream popular fiction, since it is a key plot element of Dan Brown's
latest novel Origin, which emerged
too recently for a mention in this book. However, this chapter is packed with
details of authors and novels addressing these and other issues, far too many
to list here. I will just note that I was pleased to see the inclusion on the
recommended reading list of my favourite recent novel – something completely
different, with a unique plot: China Miéville's The City and the City (reviewed in March 2012).

************************************

To sum up, Science
Fiction: a Literary History is a compact yet authoritative and thorough
summary of the field, charting its progress as a form of literature. My review
is necessarily highly selective in terms of the books and authors mentioned, and
in particular there is far more about fiction from the non-English speaking
world than I have discussed here. This book benefits from the variety of
authors, avoiding the single and possibly idiosyncratic viewpoint of most such
histories. I found it fascinating to see the various strands of SF development
dealt with in this way, and this will be guiding some of my future purchases of
both old and new fiction in order to broaden my knowledge of the field. However,
I doubt that I'll ever warm to the current trend for dystopian futures. For me,
the main attraction of SF has always been that much-derided "sense of
wonder" – having my imagination stretched by fascinating new concepts and
unexpected (but preferably hopeful) futures.

1 comment:

Welcome to the SFF blog

I started this blog in order to post reviews and comments on Science Fiction and Fantasy (mostly books or films, but occasionally on more general issues such as publishing and marketing), and of course to alert those readers not yet aware of the delights which lie in store within the covers of my own novels...see below.

This remains the main purpose of this blog, but topics may also cover non-fiction issues which may be of interest to SFF enthusiasts. Longer articles, mostly taken from earlier blog posts, are listed below, along with a full index of all book, TV and film reviews.

I aim to post a new message once a month and welcome any comments or discussion. Enjoy!

Anthony G Williams

Scales

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The Foresight War

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